


Reach Out Your Red-Stained Hand

by Penknife



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Biting, Blood, Dreams and Nightmares, Dubious Consent, Fade Sex, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:48:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22942801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/pseuds/Penknife
Summary: Mahanon has nightmares about being hunted through the Winter Palace. How fortunate that Solas is there to protect him.
Relationships: Male Lavellan/Solas
Comments: 11
Kudos: 58
Collections: Writing Rainbow Red





	Reach Out Your Red-Stained Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foxjar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxjar/gifts).



The Winter Palace is filled with a dizzying swirl of humans in satin and silk. Even in dreams, Mahanon hates this place. Everyone is masked, but in his dream, the masks are sharper and stranger than the simple dominos and portrait masks that dominate Orlesian fashion. Some snarl like frozen lions or scream like hawks captured in mid-flight. Others smile, and the smiles are the worst of all.

Mahanon’s own face is bare. He twists and turns his way through the crowd, trying to find a balcony or a staircase down to the servants’ quarters where it might be possible to breathe, but the ballroom is endless, and all the stairs wind round on themselves in impossible geometries to end in the ballroom again. All the servants he finds are dead.

He bolts up a staircase despite its dizzying ascent, certain it will make an escape to the rafters possible, but at the end of it, he steps through a door into the ballroom again. The beautifully-dressed humans look at him and smile, and the candlelight glitters off the knives in their hands.

He takes a step backwards, and the door behind him is gone. He tries to draw his sword, but of course he’s unarmed, he never found a weapon that worked in this terrible human place. The courtiers draw closer. The knives look very sharp.

And then there’s a familiar face in the crowd, Solas, not dressed for the Winter Palace but in his ordinary clothes, his jawbone talisman hanging about his neck. He leans on his staff and considers the scene as if trying to decide whether to intervene.

“If you want my help, you have only to ask,” he says finally.

“ _Do_ something,” Mahanon gasps, and rather than raising his staff, Solas merely raises one hand to trace a graceful gesture in the air. The courtiers look confused for a moment, and then turn on one another. The ensuing melee is grim and bloody and very quickly over.

Solas steps over a body to put his hand on Mahanon’s shoulder, a surprisingly comforting gesture. “Wake,” he says, and Mahanon does, in the cold and echoing Inquisitor’s bedroom at Skyhold, alone in a bed that could sleep three or four.

He finds the dream troubling, but whenever he thinks of mentioning it to Solas, somehow he always thinks again.

* * *

He’s back in the Winter Palace again, but this time there are wolves stalking the ballroom. Whenever the masked dancers seem to be closing in on Mahanon, one of the wolves appears and bares its teeth. No one touches Mahanon as long as he keeps moving, pushing his way through the crowd, pursuing corridor after corridor that looks like an escape and turns out to be a blind alley.

“You know, you aren’t actually powerless here,” Solas says. He’s standing in the alcove Mahanon has just stepped into, and he looks Mahanon over at deliberate length.

“I’m not a mage,” Mahanon says, because he’s abruptly aware that he’s dreaming, he’s in the Fade, which isn’t precisely a comfort since the last time he was in the Fade, after Adamant—

“This is your dream,” Solas says, and the half-formed skittering of claws becomes the whisper of slippers on stone again. “Would you like to be rid of your pursuers?”

“I would,” Mahanon says, and his sword is at his side, now. He could turn the ballroom into a bloodbath, but he’s tired of fighting. There’s been so much, fighting their way to Adamant and back out again, and so much fighting still lies ahead. If he’s sleeping, at least he ought to be able to have some _rest._

Solas takes a step forward, and now his fingers rest at the hollow of Mahanon’s throat. He’s not sure whether he wants to permit the touch or not, although it sends a hot shiver of desire through him. He and Solas haven’t ever been on those terms, in the waking world. “Would you like me to rid you of them?” he asks, and his breath is hot against Mahanon’s cheek. “You need only say the word.”

Mahanon means to say “no,” and instead he says “yes.” Solas’s mouth is warm at the corner of his own, a breath away from a kiss, and then they are kissing. It feels dreamlike, not much like something he actually decided.

Then Solas inclines his head, his eyes warm and intent on Mahanon’s own for a long moment before he turns away to gesture crisply. Wolves appear throughout the crowd, dark shadows weaving between the glittering figures. “Nothing here can harm you,” he says, and the wolves leap for the dancers’ throats. The blood, where it runs across the marble, is very red.

Mahanon wakes with a gasp, his cock achingly hard, his whole body tense, the shadows in every corner of the room seeming thick and menacing. It’s impossible to sleep. He pulls on enough clothing to be decent and puts on slippers against the perpetually cold stones of Skyhold’s floors.

Downstairs, the Great Hall is quiet. In the small hours of the morning, even the most persistent drinkers and talkers have gone off to seek their beds. Mahanon expects, when he crosses the hall to enter Solas’s room, that the man will be asleep as well on the couch that serves him as a bed, but instead he’s awake and seemingly unsurprised to see the Iniquisitor.

“I had a disturbing dream,” Mahanon says. “You were in it.”

“Not everything in dreams is always true,” Solas says. He advances on Mahanon, slowly but deliberately. Arousal is still an ache in Mahanon’s groin, bringing with it the treacherous desire to be touched. His bed is lonely, something that Solas must understand, having been so long alone himself.

Solas rests two fingers in the hollow of Mahanon’s throat, and Mahanon shudders, a hard, full-body reaction he can’t hide. Solas’s mouth is on his, and then skating down his jaw. He backs Mahanon up against the wall, and when he ducks his head to taste Mahanon’s throat, his mouth is hot for a moment, and then he bites. 

“No,” Mahanon says, and for a moment he’s certain Solas will only set his teeth in his throat harder.

Instead the man draws back. “Is that not what you want?”

“I don’t know,” Mahanon says, and if Solas only pushed him back against the wall and kissed him again, he’d stop trying to resist. He’s so tired.

“Then I ought to bid you good night,” Solas says. He hesitates for a long moment, and then says, “I find the dreams as troubling as you do.”

“But you have a choice about them,” Mahanon says. He doesn’t imagine Solas would find his way barred if he merely walked away from that hot, twisting ballroom out into the cool crisp expanse of the Fade.

“No more than you,” Solas says, and that’s all he seems to be willing to say.

* * *

Mahanon is walking through the Winter Palace again, the party somehow blurring into the recent victory party after Corypheus’s defeat. He keeps making out the shape of familiar faces behind the masks. He can’t decide if that’s comforting or makes the dream even worse.

Across the ballroom, standing gazing out the wide bay windows, there’s a familiar form who isn’t masked. Solas is standing with his back to Mahanon, but eventually he turns.

“I thought you might come for the party,” Mahanon says.

“I am here,” Solas says.

“This isn’t real.”

“Is the Fade less real than the waking world because it answers to our desires? You know better.”

There’s no crowd closing in around them, no shadows visible among the dancers, but all the same, Mahanon knows it would only take a word to fill the ballroom with snarling wolves and stain the marble floor with blood. “Is revenge on the shem what you want?”

“You have no idea what I want,” Solas says, and his voice is dry and distant and somehow hurt.

“You’re lonely, too,” Mahanon says, and takes a step closer.

“Then you can console me,” Solas says, and reaches out a hand to draw Mahanon closer still.

“You lied when you said nothing here would hurt me.”

“Yes,” Solas says, and bends his head to bite Mahanon’s throat hard enough to draw blood. Mahanon’s pulse is pounding, his arousal an ache between his thighs. Solas licks at the wound he’s made, and Mahanon closes his eyes.

“Did I ever actually have a choice?” he asks.

“Does anyone ever actually have a choice?” Solas says, and Mahanon isn’t sure his tone is apology or forgiveness or regret.

“You said I had to ask for your help,” Mahanon says, as Solas turns him to push him against the wall and pin him there, his grip impossibly strong. Mahanon can’t help struggling. He isn’t at all certain that he wants to escape.

“But I knew you would,” Solas says, and unfastens his clothing to take him just as roughly and thoroughly as he has hoped and feared. 

Everything about Solas is hard, his bruising grip and his hot thrusting cock and his sharp teeth. There’s no way to soften into his grasp even when Mahanon tries. He can only struggle and burn and shudder, as his arousal mounts and mounts and then breaks in a thunder that pounds through his blood and won’t end, again and again and again.

* * *

When it’s over, when Solas has left Mahanon exhausted and aching and satisfied and shaking like a leaf, Mahanon finds that he’s still in the ballroom. He expected to wake to a cold room and a mess in the sheets. Instead, he’s still here. For a moment, all he can feel is dread.

Then he turns, and there’s a door behind him. He opens it, and walks out into cool, crisp air, a broad plain where the grass whispers against grass.

“You’ll wake soon,” Solas says. There’s a shadow over him in the shape of a great wolf. It turns its head as Solas turns his. He shows little sign that he’s moved by what they just did, although there’s a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth, and when Mahanon looks at his hands, they’re shaking too. “I can’t come to you again like this. I can’t—you see too much.”

Mahanon steps forward to kiss the blood from the corner of Solas’s mouth, and then says, “That’s probably best.”

“I won’t come to you again,” Solas says, and then, “But not everything in dreams is always true.”

When Mahanon wakes, his throat aches, but his fingers touch unmarked skin. He’s sweaty and aching and cold, tangled in the linen sheets as if he’s been fighting them for hours. He’s certain as soon as he wakes that he’s entirely alone in his room.

He’s not at all certain whether he’s sorry or glad.


End file.
